Getting Published: Reflections of an Old Editor

Abstract

David W. Stewart is Robert E. Brooker Professor of Marketing and Deputy Dean, Gordon Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California. My time as editor has been a dynamic period for the marketing community. It has witnessed the maturing of information technology, the Internet boom and bust, and the collapse of some of the most widely recognized and trusted of brands, including Andersen, Sunbeam, Oldsmobile, and Firestone. Even such seemingly powerful brands as Disney, McDonald’s, AT&T, and CocaCola have struggled. At the same time, the attention of the popular business press and the public at large has become increasingly focused on markets and marketing practices. Issues of intellectual property, consumer privacy, and fair business practices have become part of the daily business headlines. The celebrity attorney has been replaced by the celebrity chief executive officer. The locus of economic growth and new organizational forms has increasingly shifted westward from Europe, the East Coast, and the Midwest to the West Coast and Asia. The only exception to these broad shifts appears to be Japan, once feared as an economic powerhouse and now reduced to a troubled economy. Change is evitable and is what sustains the need for research and scholarship. Paradigms, assumptions, and even “facts” that dominate thought and practice at one point give way to new facts and modes of thought. In my editorial statement at the beginning of my term as editor (Stewart 1999), I discussed the role of Journal of Marketing (JM) as a tangible artifact of an intellectual community. This intellectual community is very much alive and responsive to change. It is again time for a change in the stewardship of the Journal. This change will, no doubt, bring new energy, new perspectives, and new directions to the Journal. However, editors merely manage in a modest way the real changes that occur in the intellectual discipline. Most of the articles to be published by the new editor during her first year are already written and in the review process. The problems and topics on which scholars within marketing’s intellectual community are working and will work reflect the broader social and economic environment of which marketing is a part. An editor has little, if any, influence on this environment. However, an editor plays an especially important role in ensuring that the scholarship that derives from response to change is captured and published on a timely basis. I discuss three things in my last editorial as editor: First, I describe the changes that have occurred in the Journal over the past three years. These changes suggest a great deal about the nature of the changes in markets and marketing practices that have taken place. Second, I share my perspective as an editor on what is most likely to be valuable to the discipline and find its way into the pages of the Journal. This will be a brief treatise on how to get published. Third, I acknowledge the contributions of the many people who have contributed to the Journal’s success.